from The Animatazz Director’s Manual

Our Director's Manual shows you how to give your tazz characters facial expressions

Animation is all about moving your actors in small steps around your set and taking photographs of them for each movement.

It could be drawings, but using plasticine and our ANIMATAZZ EASY-ACTION figure, you can get animating your own characters in no time at all and you don’t need to be a good drawer.

With your Animatazz plasticine, you can dress them up in clothes and give them personalities of their own. We even give you a backdrop for your movie set, but of course you can make up your own with cereal boxes, or coloured card, or even just use a corner of your own bedroom with a few toys as props.

Tip on storyboards

The storyboard is an important part of planning your movie before you start shooting. It will help you to work out how best to tell your story through pictures, and how to get around any challenges that may lie ahead which you would otherwise only realise when you are in the middle of shooting, when it may be too late and require you to go ‘back to the drawing board’.

A storyboard is your movie drawn frame-by-frame in sketches of how you expect each shot to look. As only pencil and paper are needed, it is a fast yet thorough way of working out how you are going to set up and photograph each shot in order to make the story work for your audience.

Top tip from Tazzter